Melissa J. Homestead
336B Andrews Hall
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
(402)472-0323 (office)
mhomestead2@unlnotes.unl.edu

Melissa J. Homestead

Associate Professor

Degrees and institutions granting the degree

• Smith College, A.B.
• University of Pennsylvania, A.M.
• University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.

Professional Areas of Specialty

American Literature and the History of the Book, with a focus on women´s authorship

Courses regularly taught

American Literature Survey, The World of Willa Cather, 20th-Century Women Writers, Survey of Women´s Literature, Introduction to Literature, Graduate Seminar on Women Writers

Professional Activities

• Membership and Finance Officer, Society for the Study of American Women Writers
• Member of the Advisory Board, The Willa Cather Archive
• Board of Directors, Center for Great Plains Studies

Selected publications and/or projects

• American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) (chapters on Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Jane Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune).
• With Anne L. Kaufman, "Nebraska, New England, New York: Mapping the Foreground of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis´s Creative Partnership." Forthcoming in Western American Literature
• Introduction, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. New York: Signet Classics, 2007.
• "The Beginnings of the American Novel." In The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature, ed. Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Oxford UP, forthcoming 2007.
• "Behind the Veil: Sedgwick and Anonymous Publication." In Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, ed. Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, Boston: Northeastern UP, 2002. 19−35.
• "´Links of Similitude´: The Narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Author-Reader Relations at the End of the Nineteenth Century. In Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1999. 76-98.

In progress:

• "Pioneer Heroines and Middlebrow Readers: Willa Cather´s My Ántonia, Bess Streeter Aldrich´s A Lantern in Her Hand and the Popular Fiction Market."
• "Edith Lewis´s Career at Every Week, the War in Europe, and Willa Cather´s One of Ours"
• "Catharine Sedgwick Corresponds with Editors and Publishers."
• With Ellen Foster, critical introduction, notes, and contextual documents for Clarence; or, a Tale of Our Times (1830) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Under contract with Broadview Press.
• With Camryn Hansen, "A Revised Chapter in the Biography of a Book: Susanna Rowson, Mathew Carey, and the Americanization of Charlotte Temple Reconsidered."